I sumitted the following to Car Talk via their e-mail submission form:
You are 100% correct on your assessment of Real Networks - they do everything in their power to trick you into giving them money for what ought to be free.
However, going to Windows Media in response is like saying "Yugo's are poorly made, so I will buy a Trebant" - Microsoft does everything in THEIR power to FORCE you into paying them.
Why not offer your show as a MP3 stream? That way, rather than being forced to use Real or Microsoft, we can use whatever we want to!
And while you are at it, a point I've been wanting to mail you about for some time: I have an MP3 player in my car - that way, I can start my music, and then NOT MESS WITH IT for the duration of the trip - allowing me to keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes and mind on the road. When I am on a long trip, what more natural thing to want to listen to than Car Talk. However, since I cannot a) be assured of finding them being broadcast on a radio station where I am (usually should I find it I do so just as the station fades into the noise), b) download the files from your site (stream yes, download no), and c) play the files I get (since my MP3 player does not play Real or WMA), it makes it almost impossible to do so.
Again, I applaud your decision to drop Real - but please consider using MP3's instead of WMA - dropping Real for WMA because you don't like Real's tactics is like changing your motor oil to somebody else's used oil.
And NO, I am not going to suggest they use Ogg - yes, it would be free, MP3s not, but I'm trying to stay on-point that WMA is bad, not muddy the issue with a format that Click and Clack may never have heard of, and certainly a large portion of their audience has not heard of.
Anyone know when WINE is getting ported to Windows?
Actually, there is an effort to port Wine to run under MinG and Cygwin. The idea is that you could run a program under native Windows, then run it under Wine, and observe the differences. Then you try to make Wine more like Windows.
If you think about it, this COULD be done in a manner simillar to the way Apple handled the 68K to PPC conversion:
You have BOCHS run the actual application code. When the code makes a call to one of Wine's libraries, you hit an escape sequence and drop to native PPC code for the actual implementation. At the end of the call, you resume emulation. It would probably require some changes in the shim layers between the DLL exports and the core Wine code, but it could be done.
That worked well for MacOS because applications spent most of their time in OS code (which was native PPC). How well it would work for Windows programs remains to be seen.
This has been kicked around a bin on Winedev.
Disclaimer: IAAWD (I AM a Wine developer, in my own small way - I did some cleanup on the Joystick and ADPCM audio code).
While I to some extent agree with you about "you don't pay me for OT, you don't get OT", I vehemently disagree with you about "simply stop showing up for work."
First of all, failure to formally quit can get you in some nasty situations, especially if you are a programmer - you could get nailed for violating NDAs, among other things. At a minimum, you should hand in a formal letter of resignation your last day there.
HOWEVER, I really wouldn't suggest even that - it may hurt, but give them the 2 weeks notice. "Screw'em! I got another job already, fuck them!" you may say. However, this leads to what some might call an "alligator" - it may not bite you now, but when you want to leave your new job it can reach up and bite you in the ass - not only will you not be able to use the new job as a reference, but you won't be able to use the job you left as a reference ("Joe - no, I cannot recommend him - he left us in a lurch without notice.")
The world ia a very small place, and getting smaller every day. Do you know how many degrees seperation there are from your current job to the job you want to have 2 years down the road? Don't burn your bridges behind you - you may need to retreat in a hurry!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 1 of 5 - Do you want to install a backdoor? [yes] [no] [help]
SK1: Shweet! Yeah, let's set up my army of zombies! Huh-huh-huh!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 2 of 5 - Do you want to install a spam relay? [yes] [no] [help]
SK2: Dude! We can, like, make money! Do it, dude!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 3 of 5 - Do you want to install an HTTP relay ? [yes] [no] [help]
SK1: WTF? (clicks help)
Virus Creator: This lets us serve PR0N through your zombies - click yes and we will let you have the password to see some of it.
SK1 and SK2 (together): DUDE! SHWEEET!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 4 of 5 - Do you want to DDOS somebody ? [yes] [no] [help]
SK2: Yeah!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - DDOS setup - Who do you want to DDOS? [enter URL here]
SK1: Who should we fuxor? School?
SK2: DUDE! If you fuxor school how can we look at pr0n during class? (dope-smacks SK1)
SK1: OW! Fag! OK, uhhh, dude, like, the RAII?
SK2: YEAH! Fuxoring with our MP3s!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - URL "www.raii.com" not found - try again [enter URL here]
SK2: Fuxor!
SK1: Dude, like, what's something with less letters, man?
SK2: SCO?
SK1: Yeah! FUXOR JOO, SCO!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 5 of 5 - Virus ready - click here to email [ok]
SK1 and SK2 (together): SHWEET!
In other words, I think the DDOS against SCO is incidental to the real purpose of this virus - which is to spread spam. Like as not the choice of SCO was just because they are in the news, and to shift the blame to somebody else.
I make about US$40/hr direct pay - add vacation time, 401K contributions, medical, and I "see" about US$60/hr. Then I wave bye-bye to about $20/hr at least as Uncle Sugar takes his cut.
Given that I live in the relatively cheap Midwest rather than on the coasts, I do pretty well.
However - I have been doing this for over 16 years. I've been with my current company 13 years. I am one of the lead software architects here. I do everything from signal processing to OS design to systems to UI to test, and I do it damn well.
Sure, if you are fresh out of school, fuggetaboutit. Pay your dues, know your stuff, and be somebody your company can count upon to get the job done and you MAY be able to rise to my level.
and you're standing around like a spectator at the Wright brothers' first flight asking "what about in-flight entertainment, eh?"
No, I am like a spectator at the Wright Brothers' demo, looking at another spectator who is gushing over how this will revolutionize the world tommorrow, and saying "No, it will revolutionize the world SOMEDAY, but not just yet. There is much to be done, so let us not delude ourselves that this is the final item."
The article quoted the size of the display as "5 inches diagonal".
I was picking a set of units that gave numbers in single digit of precision - quoting more than one digit of accuracy in this case cannot be justified given the quality of the data.
I suggest you take a course in metrology, and learn the importance of significant digits.
Sooo, what should the consumer get when they purchase a Windows Operating System? A kernel?
No, they should get a distribution of software, just as they would with RedHat or Apple, that allows them to install the operating system, and whatever parts of the operating environment they choose to install, along with the option of replacing parts of the operating environment with other packages as they see fit.
Most people would opt for the default install, so Microsoft would still be able to make money, but the people who choose not to install something could still do so.
This is what is so maddening to me - Microsoft could compete fair and square and still win most of the time, but instead they choose to tilt the playing field.
A 2cm bend radius means that rolled up, this display will form a tube 4cm wide. This is NOT "roll-up into a pen", this is more "roll up into a scrollcase".
To put in another way: this is a 5 inch diagonal display - say 3x4 inches - that rolls up into a 2 inch wide tube. <sarcasm>Yes, that is a HUGE improvement.</sarcasm>
WHEN they get this to have a 1mm bending radius I'll get really excited. Until then this isn't all that great, although I suppose a 2 inch diameter by 3 inch long tube diameter tube full of battery and electronics, with a pull-out display might be somewhat useful.
...but doesn't the modern definition of a desktop OS contain a media player?
No, a modern operating SYSTEM does not contain a media player.
A modern operating ENVIRONMENT contains a media player.
That is, was, and in all probability ever shall be Microsoft's blind spot - that the operating SYSTEM is not the operating ENVIRONMENT.
The environment should have a media player, an email client, file management utilities, a calendar, games, HTML renderer, screen savers, contact managers, diagnostics, and many other things.
Water is a conductor*, so when the water coats the face of the dish it alters the focus of the dish by altering the shape the RF "sees". Screw the focus of the dish up, and you go from many tens of decibels of gain to as low as 0 dBi.
Keep the dish dry, and the focus stays sharp, and the only effect the rain has is a minor attenuation in the path from the bird to the dish.
(*Pure water is an insulator, of course, but given dirt in the air and on the dish and you will have enough ions in the water to make it a reasonably good conductor - enough to alter the dish's focus.)
What is the price of the sat service per month, exclusive of the equipment cost?
What would the cost be of buying a dry pair from the phone company and having them terminate a T1 at your house?
After all Rob, you could very easily write off the cost of a T1 at home as a business expense on your taxes, and worst case, I would think that even if the phone company won't terminate a data connection on it, your could route it to the cage and have it on the back end of the Slashdot router - just think, direct access to your servers from behind the firewall!
Damn, I hate it when the caffeine in my morning coffee hits all at once and I have these hallucinations flashing back to the '90's.
"Chief Smartberry"? - "They must be building something cool, because of their job titles"?
I thought the days of the dot.bomb were OVER!
Seriously - does this look like VC-bait to anybody else? I mean, I love my DirecTivo, but good hardware, good software and a good service do NOT equal good management decisions!
Like so many other things in this world, I will wait and see if anything meaningful comes out of this. Until then, I shall exercise a healthy skepticism on this matter.
YOU might want to listen to a concert via ionospheric bounce - I would not. For AM, you get far too much phase shift as the ionosphere fluxes, for FM that is going to show up as massive noise - only the new digital shortwave would worth listening to.
There's only one thing that example overlooks - there is no straight-line path from New York to LA that a radio signal can follow. So either the signal would have to be carried over terrestrial fiber (and thus travel at about 60-70% of the speed of light due to the refractive index of the fiber) or bounce off a sat and incur 44,000 miles of delay.
Given that pen drives are now at the 256M to 512M range, and a CD is 680M, how long until we see USB pen-drive distros?
And given that READING flash is pretty quick, if the drive supports 480M USB2.0, then it *should* be pretty quick, unlike an older, slower CD drive.
Of course, a modern CD drive should be pretty fast on read time (though seeks are still slow), so maybe a pen drive wouldn't be much better (except for being read/write).
Synopsis - you are a slave, who's uncle was a free man. He died and left you his spaceship (good), and the obligation to forefill his contracts (bad), which could either free you or doom you and all your decendants to eternal slavery to pay off the forfiture clauses (ugly).
So you have to fly around the galaxy, finding cargo to haul to make enough money to by the items needed by the colony to whom you are contractually bound, all the while fighting off pirates in space, muggers on the ground, and trying to keep your junk-heap spacecraft flying and maybe even improve it.
I've always felt there needed to be a sequel, after you won your freedom, to try to incite revolt among the slaves and overthrow the system.
(And for all those of you who remember Dungeon Master - remember Zed, Duke of Banville? Guess what game he came from.)
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the most common, vulgar single word utterance made by most gamers, usually when they are killed.
Now, do you REALLY want your game to be voice controlled?
EU: We are fining you EUR100M....
... And we are going to give it all to the FSF.
MS: *Yawn* Can you make change for EUR1B?
EU:
And NO, I am not going to suggest they use Ogg - yes, it would be free, MP3s not, but I'm trying to stay on-point that WMA is bad, not muddy the issue with a format that Click and Clack may never have heard of, and certainly a large portion of their audience has not heard of.
Actually, there is an effort to port Wine to run under MinG and Cygwin. The idea is that you could run a program under native Windows, then run it under Wine, and observe the differences. Then you try to make Wine more like Windows.
If you think about it, this COULD be done in a manner simillar to the way Apple handled the 68K to PPC conversion:
You have BOCHS run the actual application code. When the code makes a call to one of Wine's libraries, you hit an escape sequence and drop to native PPC code for the actual implementation. At the end of the call, you resume emulation. It would probably require some changes in the shim layers between the DLL exports and the core Wine code, but it could be done.
That worked well for MacOS because applications spent most of their time in OS code (which was native PPC). How well it would work for Windows programs remains to be seen.
This has been kicked around a bin on Winedev.
Disclaimer: IAAWD (I AM a Wine developer, in my own small way - I did some cleanup on the Joystick and ADPCM audio code).
I had removed the obfuscated version of my email - it's back now.
OK, in what forum do you wish to conduct this - my journal, email, or what?
My email (in obfucated form) is listed in my info.
While I to some extent agree with you about "you don't pay me for OT, you don't get OT", I vehemently disagree with you about "simply stop showing up for work."
First of all, failure to formally quit can get you in some nasty situations, especially if you are a programmer - you could get nailed for violating NDAs, among other things. At a minimum, you should hand in a formal letter of resignation your last day there.
HOWEVER, I really wouldn't suggest even that - it may hurt, but give them the 2 weeks notice. "Screw'em! I got another job already, fuck them!" you may say. However, this leads to what some might call an "alligator" - it may not bite you now, but when you want to leave your new job it can reach up and bite you in the ass - not only will you not be able to use the new job as a reference, but you won't be able to use the job you left as a reference ("Joe - no, I cannot recommend him - he left us in a lurch without notice.")
The world ia a very small place, and getting smaller every day. Do you know how many degrees seperation there are from your current job to the job you want to have 2 years down the road? Don't burn your bridges behind you - you may need to retreat in a hurry!
Scene - the virus writer's parents' basement
Script Kiddie #1: OK, dude, like, I got the, y'know, latest version of, like, Virus Creator, dude.
Script Kiddie #2: Swheeet! Dude, like, run it!
Script Kiddie #1: Fuxor! Like, I clicked on it, and, like, it didn't go!
SK2: Dude! You have to, like, double click! Lamer!
SK1: STFU! I know that! Fag!
SK1: Uhhh, like, it's doing sumthing. Oh - kewl! It's like, installing stuff.
SK2: Shweet! Man, this rox!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 1 of 5 - Do you want to install a backdoor? [yes] [no] [help]
SK1: Shweet! Yeah, let's set up my army of zombies! Huh-huh-huh!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 2 of 5 - Do you want to install a spam relay? [yes] [no] [help]
SK2: Dude! We can, like, make money! Do it, dude!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 3 of 5 - Do you want to install an HTTP relay ? [yes] [no] [help]
SK1: WTF? (clicks help)
Virus Creator: This lets us serve PR0N through your zombies - click yes and we will let you have the password to see some of it.
SK1 and SK2 (together): DUDE! SHWEEET!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 4 of 5 - Do you want to DDOS somebody ? [yes] [no] [help]
SK2: Yeah!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - DDOS setup - Who do you want to DDOS? [enter URL here]
SK1: Who should we fuxor? School?
SK2: DUDE! If you fuxor school how can we look at pr0n during class? (dope-smacks SK1)
SK1: OW! Fag! OK, uhhh, dude, like, the RAII?
SK2: YEAH! Fuxoring with our MP3s!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - URL "www.raii.com" not found - try again [enter URL here]
SK2: Fuxor!
SK1: Dude, like, what's something with less letters, man?
SK2: SCO?
SK1: Yeah! FUXOR JOO, SCO!
Virus Creator: Virus Creator Wizard - page 5 of 5 - Virus ready - click here to email [ok]
SK1 and SK2 (together): SHWEET!
In other words, I think the DDOS against SCO is incidental to the real purpose of this virus - which is to spread spam. Like as not the choice of SCO was just because they are in the news, and to shift the blame to somebody else.
I make about US$40/hr direct pay - add vacation time, 401K contributions, medical, and I "see" about US$60/hr. Then I wave bye-bye to about $20/hr at least as Uncle Sugar takes his cut.
Given that I live in the relatively cheap Midwest rather than on the coasts, I do pretty well.
However - I have been doing this for over 16 years. I've been with my current company 13 years. I am one of the lead software architects here. I do everything from signal processing to OS design to systems to UI to test, and I do it damn well.
Sure, if you are fresh out of school, fuggetaboutit. Pay your dues, know your stuff, and be somebody your company can count upon to get the job done and you MAY be able to rise to my level.
Steam.
The unlikelyhood of running HL2 under anything that isn't Windows.
The idea that games need to be "monetized" into a subscription mode - in other words, Steam.
No, I am like a spectator at the Wright Brothers' demo, looking at another spectator who is gushing over how this will revolutionize the world tommorrow, and saying "No, it will revolutionize the world SOMEDAY, but not just yet. There is much to be done, so let us not delude ourselves that this is the final item."
Diameter is twice radius. 2cm is close enough to an inch that twice 2 cm, plus fudge factor for thickness of display is 2 inches.
Perhaps YOU should dust off your old geometry book, and look at the difference between RADIUS and DIAMETER.
The article quoted the size of the display as "5 inches diagonal".
I was picking a set of units that gave numbers in single digit of precision - quoting more than one digit of accuracy in this case cannot be justified given the quality of the data.
I suggest you take a course in metrology, and learn the importance of significant digits.
No, they should get a distribution of software, just as they would with RedHat or Apple, that allows them to install the operating system, and whatever parts of the operating environment they choose to install, along with the option of replacing parts of the operating environment with other packages as they see fit.
Most people would opt for the default install, so Microsoft would still be able to make money, but the people who choose not to install something could still do so.
This is what is so maddening to me - Microsoft could compete fair and square and still win most of the time, but instead they choose to tilt the playing field.
A 2cm bend radius means that rolled up, this display will form a tube 4cm wide. This is NOT "roll-up into a pen", this is more "roll up into a scrollcase".
To put in another way: this is a 5 inch diagonal display - say 3x4 inches - that rolls up into a 2 inch wide tube. <sarcasm>Yes, that is a HUGE improvement.</sarcasm>
WHEN they get this to have a 1mm bending radius I'll get really excited. Until then this isn't all that great, although I suppose a 2 inch diameter by 3 inch long tube diameter tube full of battery and electronics, with a pull-out display might be somewhat useful.
No, a modern operating SYSTEM does not contain a media player.
A modern operating ENVIRONMENT contains a media player.
That is, was, and in all probability ever shall be Microsoft's blind spot - that the operating SYSTEM is not the operating ENVIRONMENT.
The environment should have a media player, an email client, file management utilities, a calendar, games, HTML renderer, screen savers, contact managers, diagnostics, and many other things.
The operating SYSTEM should NOT!
The amount of water ON the dish, from an absorbtion standpoint, is a pittance of the water in the sky between the dish and the bird.
Water is a conductor*, so when the water coats the face of the dish it alters the focus of the dish by altering the shape the RF "sees". Screw the focus of the dish up, and you go from many tens of decibels of gain to as low as 0 dBi.
Keep the dish dry, and the focus stays sharp, and the only effect the rain has is a minor attenuation in the path from the bird to the dish.
(*Pure water is an insulator, of course, but given dirt in the air and on the dish and you will have enough ions in the water to make it a reasonably good conductor - enough to alter the dish's focus.)
What is the price of the sat service per month, exclusive of the equipment cost?
What would the cost be of buying a dry pair from the phone company and having them terminate a T1 at your house?
After all Rob, you could very easily write off the cost of a T1 at home as a business expense on your taxes, and worst case, I would think that even if the phone company won't terminate a data connection on it, your could route it to the cage and have it on the back end of the Slashdot router - just think, direct access to your servers from behind the firewall!
Damn, I hate it when the caffeine in my morning coffee hits all at once and I have these hallucinations flashing back to the '90's.
"Chief Smartberry"? - "They must be building something cool, because of their job titles"?
I thought the days of the dot.bomb were OVER!
Seriously - does this look like VC-bait to anybody else? I mean, I love my DirecTivo, but good hardware, good software and a good service do NOT equal good management decisions!
Like so many other things in this world, I will wait and see if anything meaningful comes out of this. Until then, I shall exercise a healthy skepticism on this matter.
YOU might want to listen to a concert via ionospheric bounce - I would not. For AM, you get far too much phase shift as the ionosphere fluxes, for FM that is going to show up as massive noise - only the new digital shortwave would worth listening to.
There's only one thing that example overlooks - there is no straight-line path from New York to LA that a radio signal can follow. So either the signal would have to be carried over terrestrial fiber (and thus travel at about 60-70% of the speed of light due to the refractive index of the fiber) or bounce off a sat and incur 44,000 miles of delay.
Given that pen drives are now at the 256M to 512M range, and a CD is 680M, how long until we see USB pen-drive distros?
And given that READING flash is pretty quick, if the drive supports 480M USB2.0, then it *should* be pretty quick, unlike an older, slower CD drive.
Of course, a modern CD drive should be pretty fast on read time (though seeks are still slow), so maybe a pen drive wouldn't be much better (except for being read/write).
Anybody have any experience in this?
Sundog:
Synopsis - you are a slave, who's uncle was a free man. He died and left you his spaceship (good), and the obligation to forefill his contracts (bad), which could either free you or doom you and all your decendants to eternal slavery to pay off the forfiture clauses (ugly).
So you have to fly around the galaxy, finding cargo to haul to make enough money to by the items needed by the colony to whom you are contractually bound, all the while fighting off pirates in space, muggers on the ground, and trying to keep your junk-heap spacecraft flying and maybe even improve it.
I've always felt there needed to be a sequel, after you won your freedom, to try to incite revolt among the slaves and overthrow the system.
(And for all those of you who remember Dungeon Master - remember Zed, Duke of Banville? Guess what game he came from.)